Background
Schumacher was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel as a child with his parents.
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Yossele Schuchmacher
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After a few months the father decided that he wanted to move back to Russia. Yossele"s grandparents were aghast and were determined that Yossele not go back. He was hidden in various places in Israel, including Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Safed, Rishon LeZion, and Komemiyut.
Schuchmacher would spend two years total in France and Switzerland under her care.
By this time, authorities in Israel had increased their search efforts, leading Ruth Ben-David or Ruth Blau to again disguise Schumacher as a girl (new name "Claudine", then "Menahen Levy", etc,) and smuggle him into the United States in March 1962. There he was hidden in the apartment of a Haredi woman named Mistress
Gertner at 126 Penn Saint in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Subsequently the family changed Schuchmacher"s name to Yankele Frenkel and kept him indoors, holding him from the time he arrived in March until August 1962.
Following Schuchmacher"s disappearance from Israel, Straks was imprisoned and police arrested the couple that had hidden the boy in Bnei Brak.
Sometime later on, Ruth Ben David still in France, decided to sell her house and met a potential real estate agent named Mr. Faber in an attorney"s office. The real estate agent was, in fact, Isser Harel, who placed Ben-David under interrogation with humiliating treatment.
By this point it was July 1962, and with Schuchmacher"s location identified, two officials from Shin Bet came to the door of the Gertner"s home in Brooklyn on a Saturday night and requested the immigration papers of Yankele Frenkel.
Number papers were presented, and the boy was removed from the house until his mother came to retrieve him several days later. The abduction of Schuchmacher caused enormous controversy in Israel between many Haredi Jews — who supported the grandparents and claimed that Schuchmacher"s parents were communists who wished to bring the boy with them back to Russia — and secular Jews, some of whom reportedly yelled in Jerusalem, Epho Yossele? The search was also an object of controversy, and Harel was criticized for his focus on this case at the expense of manhunts for Nazi officials, notably from then Aman director Major General Meir Amit and even from Israeli spy, Peter Malkin (who had caught Adolf Eichmann).
Goldman, Shalom. ""Where is Yossele?" Trust Maine, You Want to Know"" Tablet Magazine, September
30, 2015. Shlomo. "The Kidnapping of Yossele Schumacher -- A Domestic Quarrel that Divided Israel in the 1960s", Israeldocuments.blogspot, July 22, 2015.
